So I’ve been reading through the documentation on reflection environments, and came across this section:
“Static light types should not be used together with the Reflection Environment as they will put direct lighting in the lightmap. Note that this mixing with the lightmap also means that the map must have meaningful indirect diffuse lighting, and that lighting must already be built to see results.”
I have a larger than average environment that is lit with probably about 20 lights in total. I was hoping to be able to bake static lighting information, but after reading this, am I correct in assuming I will be unable to do that if I want to use reflection probes in my scene? When I bake static lighting and use environment capture probes, I get extremely bright reflective spots on my polished concrete floor material. I noticed the reflections become much more realistic when I switch the lights to stationary and bake but then I run into that 3 light per object limit extremely fast! Do you guys have any ideas or tips for approaching this problem?
Is it possible to have static lights with 0 direct intensity but with an indirect lighting contribution of 1, and bake JUST the bounce lighting and not the direct lighting?
Wether this the best thing to do or not, I do not know. But I am working on an interior scene. I too have noticed the reflections and lighting quality is better with stationary lights as well. I have can lights in rows and they interact with the adjacent can lights. So I turned off cast shadows for every other light so they would not interact with each other. It seems to be working ok.
Thanks for the reply. When you are saying “can” lights, are you talking about lights with a source radius and length? Or what specifically do you mean when you say can lights?
I do not understand tech behind the limitation using stationary lights. I only seem to have the problem when they begin to overlap after the 4 light limit.
Yea once I turn off cast shadows they seem to work fine. I can probably work with that. It’s probably just a matter of playing with values but my main problem is I don’t get very strong GI in rooms lit with only IES point lights. I read on some forums (specifically UE4) arch, that they don’t ever mess with indirect lighting intensities either on their lights or Post Process Volumes so I’m looking for an alternative way to increase the GI without using those methods.